Debian GNU/Linux 9 'Stretch' Installer Gets GNU Screen, Linux Kernel 4.7 Support (softpedia.com)

"Debian developer Cyril Brulebois was pleased to announce this past weekend the release and immediate availability of the eighth Alpha development snapshot of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 'Stretch' installer," reports Softpedia. An anonymous reader quotes their article: It's been four long months since Alpha 7 of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" hit the testing channels back in July, but the wait was worth it as the Alpha 8 release adds a huge number of changes, starting with initial support for the GNU Screen terminal multiplexer and lots of debootstrap fixes, which now defaults to merged-/usr.

"debootstrap now defaults to merged-/usr, that is with /bin, /sbin, /lib* being symlinks to their counterpart in /usr (more details on: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/09/msg00269.html)," wrote Cyril Brulebois in the mailing list announcement, where it states that default debootstrap mirror was switched to deb.debian.org.

Comments

All linked in /usr ?

[psergiu]

All binary & lib dirs linked in /usr ?
That's incredibly STUPID
Don't they know why /usr existed in the 1st place ?

Story time:

Back in the days when today's grumpy old beardy Unix Admins were young PFYs, the Unix operating system and it's ilk were gaining more and more libraries and utilities.
Unfortunately the hard drives at the time were very small so / was running out of space. Thus a new hard-drive was mounted at /usr, and all the binaries and libraries not needed to boot the system into multiuser were moved from /bin, /sbin & /lib into /usr/bin, /usr/sbin & /usr/lib.
This also allowed universities to have labs full of workstations with very small and cheap HDDs and NFS-mount a single /usr (as read-only) to all of them. New software needed on all workstations ? Just put-it on the shared /usr

So:

Those days we have large enough storage devices for huge / partitions and cheap enough that we don't need to NFS-mount them on lots of computers.

If you don't want to have binaries & libraries separated into / and /usr/ JUST PUT EVERYTHING IN / DAMMIT !

Re:All linked in /usr ?

[lordlod]

All binary & lib dirs linked in /usr ? That's incredibly STUPID Don't they know why /usr existed in the 1st place ?

Story time: [...]

Of course they know why /usr existed in the first place, the article references two discussions about the merits and downsides of such a move. To me the critical argument is that the original use case you cited of late mounting /usr to a networked filesystem is already broken, mostly by udev, and fixing it is not realistic or worthwhile.

As for shifting everything to root, I agree reflexively but there are advantages to having /usr, high on the list is the fact that people expect it and that it is the approach that Fedora takes. A move like that would impose considerable work on the entire ecosystem without any clear benefit.

The Bottom Line though is this is a change to the default. Debian does and will continue in the future to support both arrangements. So long as people see advantages in having a separated /bin and /usr/bin and configure their systems that way they will continue to exist as a configurable option.

Re:All linked in /usr ?

[cerberusss]

All binary & lib dirs linked in /usr ?
That's incredibly STUPID
Don't they know why /usr existed in the 1st place ?

If you had read the fffffine article, you'd seen the link to an article that condenses the pros and cons: https://lwn.net/Articles/67007...
Of course they know why /usr existed in the first place.

Basically what it comes down to, is that only embedded systems want that separation. And everyone acknowledges that: "The discussion thus eventually turned toward whether or not Debian would risk losing a significant number of embedded users by not addressing their specific concerns. That question remains open to debate, given its speculative nature."

In the end, it seems the advantages of one /usr directory outweighted the advantages and tradition of separate /usr, /sbin and /lib directories.

Re:Just ... screen?

[gustygolf]

Thanks, I was wondering what GNU Screen was doing in an installer ... except that your post doesn't actually really illuminate the situation at all.

Anyway, I followed your links for a bit and here's (some) description of it : https://lists.debian.org/debia...

I have a new idea on d-i/network-console: multi-console support (screen/tmux).

For d-i on normal PC, we can simply press alt-F2 to get a console
almost anytime during install, but it's not easy for current
network-console if there's no serial console.
So I'm wondering whether it's possible to add screen/tmux support.

Yeah, it's not worth much, but now I can actually see the use ...